


Build A Pyre

by ancestrallizard



Category: Fate/stay night & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen, Reader's gender not specified, Reader-Insert, alluded to not explicit, involuntary drug use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-02
Updated: 2018-10-02
Packaged: 2019-07-24 00:16:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16169693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ancestrallizard/pseuds/ancestrallizard
Summary: You and Merlin burn down an abandoned Chuck E. Cheese.





	Build A Pyre

You agree to break into the abandoned Chuck E. Cheese, but it’s Merlin’s idea that ends up burning it down. 

Your Caster wanted to see inside, and because you had nowhere else to be and there was nothing to stop you, you entered. 

You don’t know why he wants to see inside an abandoned children’s entertainment restaurant. The Grail is supposed to give Servants the information they need to survive in the modern world – he should know what it was already. You should get what he knows and doesn’t know sorted, before the Holy Grail War truly gets underway. 

The doors had broken a long time ago. The place should have been hollowed out, but for whatever reason, its off road location or corporate oversight, it had been left to rot. A small part of the ceiling has caved in. What machines haven’t been broken and stolen are fast decaying. Moldy, wet leaves coat the floor, blown in from the broken window, and the colors on the wall are all faded and peeled. There’s a dirty mattress in the corner, covered by a blanket and bottles.

With it being autumn, and dusk setting in, it’s frigid. You might be uncomfortable if not for the coat you were lent before caster’s summoning. It’s more formal than necessary, and restricts some movement, but your clan insisted. To display their status to the other clans, and it was wear a Servant of such status as Merlin would expect.

Though you didn’t need to bother. Caster is dressed for…something you cannot figure out. He was offered clothes, but decided to dress himself, and the end result looked like someone crashed headfirst into a secondhand store and picked whatever their concussed brain thought went together. You know nothing about fashion beside the bare essentials and its even giving you a headache. You don’t know where he got the trainers and sunglasses. Nowhere on the manor, surely. 

Merlin snaps the gum he started chewing a half-hour ago, and you flinch slightly at the noise (and you don’t know where he got the gum, either). He inspects the one ski ball machine not in pieces. “You ever been here before?”

“Yes.” You came here, once, for a classmate’s birthday party. Before your mother remarried and the two of you moved away to the estate where the rest of your education was handled by private tutors. 

The noise of other children and the smell of greasy food was overwhelming, and you spent most of the day alone on the edges of the crowd. The only thing of note about the day was that you were pushed down by some other children and scraped your knee badly enough to tear skin away. You retreated, watched it bleed, and bit your lip because even at that age you knew you weren’t supposed to cry.

Aside from scatter flashes in blurred dreams, you hadn’t thought about it since. 

Your stomach twists around, almost-but-not-quite-painful. Not unusual. Normally you would take an antacid, but you forgot them back at the estate. 

Caster continues to look around. He does not need you, so you stand, and wait for him to come back. The strange sensation in your chest does not abate. 

“Do you want to leave?” You ask once he returns. The sensation in your chest has not eased. Maybe if you exit soon the symptoms will subside. 

“Not quite yet.” He points to the stage across the room. The only things left are moldy curtains and a rusty, decapitated animatronic. “Hit that.” 

“What?”

“The stage. Use a fire spell, try hitting it.” He says.

You blink. “I cannot cast spells unassisted.” 

“Just give it a try.” 

So you do. You point your palm flat out at the stage and say the words. Your hand heats a fraction, but nothing else happens. 

“That was somehow even worse than I thought it’d be.” Caster says when your arm falls, snapping his gum again. 

Your chest feels heavy, and again you think of the antacids you forgot. “As I said, I cannot use magecraft alone.”

You could when you were younger, according to your mother, but something changed. You go through the correct motions, correct words, and according to dozens of specialists there is nothing wrong with your magic circuits, but it never manages to work. 

“I still don’t get why.” Caster had taken off the ridiculous sunglasses at some point, and he moves a bit as he looks at you, like examining the problem from new angles will lead to a solution. He is grave in a way you haven’t seen before. “You’re clearly no good as a magus.”

He is not wrong, so you don’t say anything. 

“The other masters will all have the best magus they can get. Does your clan want to loose?” 

Your diaphragm constricts again, and your lungs itch. Your stomach feels heavy, like a stone was dropped in it. Is this an illness? 

“Or maybe they do. If they had to send a sacrificial lamb, it may as well be you.”

There is ample room between the two of you, but for some reason you feel cornered. 

“I’m not –“ You begin to protest (protest what? Nothing he said needs correcting).

“This is the most important thing you will do in your life. The most your can hope for. ” He goes on. “And your best is pathetic. You’re not enough.”

It’s the wording that does it. He voices your thoughts verbatim, like he peeled your skull away and looked inside your brain the second you took your eyes off him. 

Your core muscles tense further, pulling so tightly it feels like you’re going to snap in half. You vision tints red, and – 

Something behind your eyes breaks. 

The heaviness and heat and choking sensation bursts over and bleeds with the sound of Caster’s gum and everything he said, everything was true you’re being sacrificed to a war you have no chance of winning and you don’t know why and you know that and they know that but they still tore you away from college and what few things you tried to make yours but it doesn’t matter all torn away in the end, the burning twists over into getting pushed at the party and skinning your knee, and your mother telling you at fifteen, ten, five, be quiet stop talking stop fidgeting drink this, and into a sour bitter taste and not so much calming as sinking under your mind, under everything to a place where nothing can reach you, feeling nothing only moving when you open your mouth to say thank you, just saying thank you for everything that they give you, everything they take away, and words mean nothing no matter what you say or do you won’t be right and they let you know it, this is the least you can do and you can’t even get that right, and they keep, they keep telling you to be more you never stopped trying to be more but you can’t and – 

You’re _angry_. 

The revelation is a livewire. You’re angry. This pain, this burning, is anger. You’ve been angry all the time, at all of them, for so, so long – 

Merlin whistles behind you. “Now you’ve got it!”

Something cracks, louder than his gum, and an acrid, waxy smell hits your nose, tearing you from your thoughts. At some point you fell to the floor. Your throat feels like its been scraped raw.

The stage has been obliterated. It’s a molten pit in the floor, warping the ground around it until it resembled cracked rocks ringing a volcano crater. The animatronic skeleton had been blown to the side, melted past recognition. Fire is steadily racing across the ceiling and along the patches of flooring that aren’t dampened. Smoke clogs the air, and you realize its not just the tightness in your chest that’s making it hard to breathe. 

You try to get to your feet, but a surge of dizziness knocks you back down. Your muscles are water, and your head spins too rapidly to orient. You think for a moment you’re going to burn to death. 

But Caster lifts you to your feet, slinging your arm over his shoulder. His jacket smells like mint. 

He helps you out of the building, just as burning chunks of the ceiling start to crumble down. 

 ---

You both watch the blaze from a distance. 

A group of firetrucks wall in the building, and a crew of firefighters try to get the burning building under control and stop the fire from spreading to the trees. A few people have gathered behind the barriers to watch.

Everyone is moving in a frantic, controlled panic, but no one ever glances at the two of you, though you’re in front of the police barrier, standing by a crumbling concrete wall.

The sleeve of your outermost jacket was singed worse than you thought before you escaped. You shrug it off. There are dozens of identical ones to replace it. 

“You’ve got a lot of endurance, you know that? It took way longer than I thought for you to snap.” 

You think about the tension and frustration that started ever since you broke into the now dying building, and the resulting explosion of feeling and magic. “That was you?”

Caster shakes his head. “I was just giving you a nudge in the right direction.”

Something in the building collapses. Embers are flung up into lethal spirals as the firefighters shout and retreat. 

“This is all you”.

His eyes are flat. Refracted orange light blends with the purple in his irises. Another light burns in them too, colorless and deeper than the fire. For the first time since his summoning you remember that he was born from a demon.

You lean back against the wall, exhausted, and try to tap into the feelings again.

The numbness, so ubiquitous that you haven’t been able to recognize it as numbness, has returned, but something from before stirs again, faintly. A tiny reddish-blue flame sparks in your palm. You’re surprised that it doesn’t hurt. It twists around your fingers, like an exploratory snake, and curls back into the center of your palm before burning itself out. 

“What a start, though!” He says, as the firefighters finally get the flames to give ground. “Next time will be a cakewalk.”

Caster easily could have let your own nascent magic destroy you. You know he would, if he didn’t think you had potential as a Master. He might change his mind next time.

But this was the first time you’ve used a spell. The first time you’ve felt something besides inexpressible discontent. 

Merlin offers you a stick of gum from one of his myriad jacket pockets and smiles at you. He smiles so often, and they never reach his eyes. 

“Good job, Master.” 

You take it. 

The cold burn of menthol blends with the ash as you watch the sparks pulled helplessly into the night sky.

**Author's Note:**

> this still doesn’t make any sense but ive left behind any expectation of my stuff being decent a long time ago 
> 
> I've got a tumblr and twitter, feel free to hit up either 
> 
> http://ancestrallizard.tumblr.com/
> 
> https://twitter.com/DVLblues


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